The Philip Roth Bus Tour

In an NPR interview a week after the Philip Roth@80 conference and tribute, Philip Roth told Scott Simon that among his great discoveries since retiring from fiction writing is the “bliss” of the midday nap:

Let me tell you about the nap. It’s absolutely fantastic. When I was a kid, my father was always trying to tell me how to be a man. And he said—I was maybe nine—he said, Philip, whenever you take a nap, take your clothes off and put a blanket over you and you’re going to sleep better. Well, as with everything, he was right. And so I now do that and I come back from the swimming pool, I go to and I have my lunch and I read the paper and I take this glorious thing called a nap. And then the best part of it is that when you wake up, for the first fifteen seconds you have no idea where you are. You’re just alive. That’s all you know and it’s bliss. It’s absolute bliss.

Roth scholars could probably attribute this quote even if I hadn’t: the repetitive diction, the string of “Ands,” the reverence for the father, the ennoblement of routine. . . . About the only unexpected line, from this author for whom locale is so important, is the bliss of no-place, the separation of nap and map. Typically, Roth’s characters are either indelible to their location, or their stories emerge as plots about place, and Roth’s novels have launched scores of critical assessments on the cultural meaning of diaspora for American Jews. Indeed, in Roth’s Operation Shylock the question “Where is Philip Roth?” (posed by the fictionalized Roth to himself) indexes dislocation as despair. In that novel, the only thing that gets the suicidal Philip through the night is his memory of home in Newark, with his brother Sandy. For good reason, no place is more closely associated with Roth and his fiction than Newark, Roth’s hometown and setting for several of his novels, but the “bliss” of being “just alive” hardly characterizes the city, in fiction or real life.

What follows is an overview of the “Philip Roth Bus Tour of Newark,” part of the Roth@80 event, but I pause here to recall that, just as Roth insists that his characters, however much they may resemble the author, are the labor of imagination, so too should we keep in mind that Roth’s Newark is itself a fictional place, standing in for provinciality as much as for worldliness. Roth regularly wrote about the writer’s relationship to the world around him in the Zuckerman novels, first when the young Nathan Zuckerman oscillates between two mentors, the riotous, worldly Abravanel, and the reclusive, detached Lonoff. Zuckerman himself would take Lonoff’s place in seclusion late in life, and Roth too seems to have taken that turn toward isolation, living alone in a farmhouse in Connecticut, rigidly maintaining a decade-long separation from the surrounding world while he produced some of his most vigorous and worldly fiction, bringing us back to the question, pressed a little more urgently now, just what were a few dozen serious Roth scholars doing on a bus tour of “Roth’s Newark”? Who or what were we looking for?

No one on the Roth bus tour embarked on the experience with thoughts of serious research, but ironic distance seemed off the mark as well. Perhaps plotting Roth’s childhood and tracing the routes of Roth’s characters was less a matter of geography than of point of view, taking on the role of the obsessive fan and seeing through the eyes of Alvin Peppler and Moishe Pipik, Roth’s stalker-characters. If I struggle to characterize the bus tour, it’s because it was a liminal event: following a full-day academic conference on Roth’s literature, and preceding a celebratory tribute to Roth’s career—with appearances by literary celebrities and Roth himself—the bus tour was an occasionally enchanting, sometimes odd, frequently Rothian tour of Roth’s Newark. The...